Using a touchscreen pre-iPhone usually felt like executing commands on a computer application. Using an iPhone felt like directly manipulating the underlying c

Using a touchscreen pre-iPhone usually felt like executing commands on a computer application. Using an iPhone felt like directly manipulating the underlying content. It was a qualitatively different experience that only superficially resembled previous touchscreen devices insofar as it used similar input hardware. Note that Apple didn't invent the concept of a responsive UI thread with physics-based UI metaphors, for example Jeff Han demonstrated a fairly sophisticated example at TED2006[1] the year before. But to my knowledge the iPhone was the first mass-produced device with a direct manipulation interface. [1] https://www.ted.com/talks/jeff_han_the_radical_promise_of_the_multi_touch_interface/ https://www.ted.com/talks/jeff_han_the_radical_promise_of_th...